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The MLS season is so damn long. Our first preseason game is this Friday. Also, Vermes said we aren’t going to train in altitude at all for Toluca (the bomeonera is highest stadium in North American Soccer I think). His theory is to get in and out of the altitude as quick as possible. Says his staff believes the longer you train in altitude the more it leads to injuries with the deoxygenated muscles. Looking at TFC last year (they spent their whole preseason in Mexico in altitude) I could believe him.

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The MLS season is so damn long. Our first preseason game is this Friday. Also, Vermes said we aren’t going to train in altitude at all for Toluca (the bomeonera is highest stadium in North American Soccer I think). His theory is to get in and out of the altitude as quick as possible. Says his staff believes the longer you train in altitude the more it leads to injuries with the deoxygenated muscles. Looking at TFC last year (they spent their whole preseason in Mexico in altitude) I could believe him.

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Don’t listen to this idiot. In McDowells article today he said we’ll train in Albuquerque for 3 days before the Toluca match.

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Not too much in this. The comment that last year they were more concerned with the 2019 roster rather than the 2018 was interesting. Also, we’ve won our 2 preseason “games” by combined score of 11-0. Still don’t see ya beating Toluca.

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The sun beat down on the grass at the Phoenix Rising stadium as Sporting Kansas City coach Peter Vermes walked around his team’s post-practice stretching last week.

While many MLS teams were just beginning their preseasons, Sporting had already been working for two weeks in preparation for a CONCACAF Champions League match-up against Liga MX side Toluca on Feb. 21 and Feb. 28.

Coming off of a season in which it finished in first place in the Western Conference, Vermes felt confident about the changes his team made ahead of the 2019 season. The team added several key contributors, both through intraleague trades and external transfers, and it brought back the core of its team from 2018—though days later it would trade Ike Opara to Minnesota United for $900,000 in Targeted Allocation Money.

That move, though, should not be surprising. Vermes has long been considered one of the best at what he does in MLS—in two fields. Vermes won the league’s first-ever Sporting Executive Of The Year award at the end of the 2018 season, and also finished third in voting for the league’s Coach of the Year award. His willingness to move top players and find a way to keep Sporting in MLS Cup contention has helped grow that reputation as a top executive.

With Sporting reaching the midway point of its preseason preparation, Vermes provided a peek into how he went about planning this year’s roster, gave his thoughts about SKC’s No. 9 spot, and also provided his opinion on some league-wide issues.

How have you seen Kelyn Rowe, Rodney Wallace and the other new additions grasp on to what you want to do here?

The decision we made with the four additions we made this year, three of which are from the league, and us knowing those players and looking at the characteristics that we wanted, all three players fit us really, really well in what we were looking for.

You look at Rowe, easily a No. 8 or a No. 10 for us. Busy, good with both feet, energetic, good engine, smart decisions and then relentless getting in the box. Wants to score, wants to get in there. And I love that penetrating run coming from the midfield. Rodney is an unbelievable competitor, great work ethic, team guy, wants to win, can play multiple positions. All these guys are so open to learning, it’s incredible. He’s been very good on the left side for us. And then you’ve got Hurtado who comes in and I think everybody is even more surprised at how good he is with the ball. Unbelievable closing-down speed. Fast and strong and powerful. He’s a guy who can stretch the game because you can play him over the top and he can run in behind.

The Hungarian central defender, (Botond Barath), same as well. It’s his first time being out of the country but he loves it. He said something to me the other day I hadn’t heard. He played in the same club in Hungary for 10 years, so I said to him, ‘How are you liking it here?’ and he said, ‘I was professional 10 years in Hungary, but I didn’t know I wasn’t professional until I came here. This is professional. This is an unbelievable experience for me.’ And he’s a good player. He’s really simple. He’s like the most basic, ‘OK, I’ve got to win that ball, alright I win it. Alright, give it to that guy.’ He’s simple, but he gets the job done. But what I would say about all of them is how fast they’ve all gotten in the group. It’s like they’ve been here five years.

It seems like the thought was trying to truly have a roster that’s two-deep with starting-caliber players at almost every position because of the attrition of a condensed schedule with CONCACAF Champions League, too.

Our plan for this year really started way back in the beginning of ’18. When we were building our team going into the ’18 year it was for ’19. Getting a bunch of guys re-signed knowing that going into this year that we were going to have to make some additions and that we were going to try to make a number of those additions within the league, if possible, and then one or two maybe outside the league. It was getting guys in we thought could be starters, because I had an idea that things were going to be condensed, if you take that one month on, you cram in all the games, you add Champions League, you still have Open Cup and there’s talk of a Mexican-MLS tournament starting up. So there is all this stuff coming.

The days of having 13, 14, 15 guys in that rotation, for me, are going away. I wanted to get two guys in every position I felt could play. Now will they play as good as the other guy? I can’t answer that. But I think we are, in a lot of positions, really close. When I look at our midfield now, you’ve got (Felipe) Gutierrez, (Roger) Espinoza, (Ilie) Sanchez, Rowe, (Gianluca) Busio, (Wan) Kuzain, I could throw (Yohan) Croizet in there. Look at wingers: We have Gerso (Fernandez), Daniel Salloi, Johnny Russell, Croizet, Kelyn can play there. That was the big thing. Trying to make sure we were able to build our roster that way going into this, because even early we play our Champions League on (February) 21st, 28th and then flying to LAFC and playing in LA on that Sunday. That’s not going to be an easy turnaround from that (CCL) game. So we have to have guys that can play and help us as we go through the season. I think it’s going to be a little of an uphill challenge at the beginning, but once we get used to it I think we’ll be OK.

With wanting that depth, there has been debate about releasing players for the Under-20 World Cup. You’ve got Jaylin (Lindsey) and Busio, both of whom are involved in youth national teams. What is your take on the benefit of letting a player go versus keeping a player with your club?

I think the World Cup is a lot different than just an international friendly for those guys. What it’s going to come down to is where they are in that moment for the team. But I will tell you this, we have a plan for each of those young kids that they have to get so many games between the first team and the B team, and I can’t tell you what the combination on each team will be, but between the two they’re going to get X amount of games. That’s what we think is the most important. When it comes to those competitions, I can tell you that 99 percent of the time we are supporting that, unless one of those guys has made it into the first team and is a starter and is playing, now that’s a little different scenario.

So, do you sympathize with Jim Curtin who has a starter in Mark McKenzie who would also feature for the U-20s?

I do. I do. But that’s also what’s changing in our league. It used to be 13 or 14 guys in a rotation, now you need 20. And that’s the challenge. For us it was a big, big strategic move over a year ago now that we were doing that for 2019 seeing that things were coming. We’ve added players where we can interchange them out, where I would say in the past I don’t think we would have been as comfortable.

With the new schedule, even if you make MLS Cup your season ends in mid-November. If you don’t make the playoffs, you have four months between games. What is your plan for that? Do you think the league has to start games earlier in February and start camps earlier to prevent such a long amount of time off?

I do think that we need to start preseason earlier, that’s the key, and there not being this mad rush to get everybody healthy, fit, and ready to play a 90-minute match. If you can stretch the preseason a bit longer and have a progressive build-up, then you lessen injuries during preseason and during the upcoming season and you’re in a better place. And then you also extend your season a bit more.

Through three weeks of preseason, what players should SKC fans be excited about? Who has surprised you or been especially sharp this preseason?

There’s no doubt in my mind that all those guys I spoke about they are good additions and they’re new, so they’ll catch peoples’ eyes. Rowe has come in really firing. I also think Krisztian Nemeth, he had surgery right at the end of the season, he had held off on it, and he’s looking really, really good at the moment. He’s getting back to his old self. I can see that in him.

So you feel confident in what you’ve got in the No. 9 spot with Nemeth?

Oh yeah, I do. I think we’ve got really good people. If you take the 16 goals last year in all competitions that Daniel (Salloi) scored and you take those and stick them to a No. 9, no one would be asking me if a winger is going to score more goals this year. Just a No. 9. It just so happened Khiry (Shelton) was really good for our team, but he didn’t score a lot of goals. When we come off a year like we did last year and score more goals than this club has ever scored in its history, it tells me we have a balanced attack and we have some more coming. I just see it. Nemeth is now starting for us. Hurtado is a really good addition. And when I look at the ability for Johnny Russell having gotten a rest after having played 17 or 18 straight months and now he’s back fresh again, I think he’s going to be a difference-maker, as well, this year.

You seem to always come out on top in trades. This year the Kelyn Rowe trade is a good example. Why do you think that is?

I don’t know. I don’t. I think we know what we want in a lot of situations, and a lot of times we go and get it. I’ll give you an example. At the end of the 2012 season, I gave $150,000 in allocation money and two draft picks (a first-round pick and a second-round pick) for Benny Feilhaber. That was a lot back then. Some would have said way too much for Benny since he was not playing. But we had determined we had to have a player like Benny in our team, with the team we had, to win MLS Cup. We needed that guy. Well, we won in 2013. So my ownership would’ve given $500,000 in allocation money. To me, I think you’ve got to get what it is you want when you want it and just go get it and don’t worry about what everybody else thinks. If it works, nobody is going to say anything about what happened.

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A few kit things. The 2017 kit with the sweet collar and vertical white lines got a lot of brushback from adidas. It was time consuming to make and they did some fancy silk screening for the stripes that Adidas normally doesn’t do so they cuffed the design team a bit last year and this. We begged Adidas to let us keep the Argyle Chrome kits as a alternate but they shot us down. We can no longer do an Indigo kit for our dark version if it contains sporting blue (like the stripes in the 2015 version). It’s not dark enough by league standards. So no more Indigo plus Sporting Blue. We wanted to move away from argyle because North Carolina uses argyle and our colors. Adidas no longer makes long sleeve kits and the staff has no clue what they’re going to do with Ilie, they don’t want him wearing a long sleeve shirt under his kit in the summer. Compression sleeves maybe? Adidas is pushing the “glitch” design worldwide as their new thing.

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Interested in the “couple additions”, we all know Sam’s sources are Peter and Kerry. I’ve been soapboxing that Zelalem will be brought in during the summer window in a free after we sell Busio to Seria A on a big deal. I just don’t see it happening this window. Who would be the “other” addition, that intrigues me. We just added another CB (thought they were happy with Dick as CB4). So it HAS to be 9 or a 6 imo. Too deep everywhere else.

A few kit things. The 2017 kit with the sweet collar and vertical white lines got a lot of brushback from adidas. It was time consuming to make and they did some fancy silk screening for the stripes that Adidas normally doesn’t do so they cuffed the design team a bit last year and this. We begged Adidas to let us keep the Argyle Chrome kits as a alternate but they shot us down. We can no longer do an Indigo kit for our dark version if it contains sporting blue (like the stripes in the 2015 version). It’s not dark enough by league standards. So no more Indigo plus Sporting Blue. We wanted to move away from argyle because North Carolina uses argyle and our colors. Adidas no longer makes long sleeve kits and the staff has no clue what they’re going to do with Ilie, they don’t want him wearing a long sleeve shirt under his kit in the summer. Compression sleeves maybe? Adidas is pushing the “glitch” design worldwide as their new thing.

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So you're saying MLS should tell Adidas to kick rocks? What a load of shit.

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So the whole cauldron Facebook group shutting down is kinda weird IMO. I know that the people there could be either difficult or absurdly stupid but it was a good resource IMO. Of course I am not heavily involved so there was likely some drama I wasn't aware of.